


the future's what you make it

by punkfaery



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, Post-War, Redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2019-03-30 02:34:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13940760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/punkfaery/pseuds/punkfaery
Summary: “Some people,” said a voice from behind her, clear and distinct, “just don’t know when they’re not wanted.”“How they avoided Azkaban I’ll never know,” someone else said.Narcissa ignored it all and slid her piece of paper through the slot. “I’m applying to volunteer with the relief services,” she said to the wizard behind the counter, who was eyeing her with a combination of confusion and contempt. “Do I need any prior experience?”From behind her came muttering, and scattered laughter.---Narcissa Malfoy regroups.





	the future's what you make it

**Author's Note:**

> this is my first ever harry potter fic, somehow, and it's about narcissa malfoy, because she's an underappreciated character and i have a soft spot for those. constructive criticism is welcome. enjoy!!

Narcissa was always good at fights.

You wouldn’t guess that now, of course. Age had refined her, smoothing out the rough edges. Her hair had always been silver; now all she had to was hide her crows’ feet with makeup, and hone her statuesque figure through careful dieting. During the bad times, during the war, she had shed what curves she had and become a willow branch, tense enough to snap. She remembered feeling impossibly light and hollow, like the bones of a bird. Remembered being able to make her thumb and finger meet around her forearm. More than that, she remembered the fear. That familiar urge to lash out like a cornered animal, to _fight back._ Defend herself with kicks and fingernails and teeth.

But this wasn’t the kind of war she knew how to fight. Not if she wanted to live. And she did want, very badly, to live. She wanted all of them to live – her husband, even if he was sometimes cold and often cruel, her quicksilver son with the pale expressive eyes he’d inherited from her and the practised sneer he’d learned from Lucius, her mother, her father, her sister. Both of her sisters. She wanted to teach Draco how to cast a Patronus, to sit across the table from Lucius and laugh about the latest scandal at the Ministry. She wanted –

Oh, but that was no good. What did _wanting_ have to do with any of it? 

“He’s dead!” she called out to the Dark Lord, kneeling over the not-body of the boy who was meant to save them all. His hair was dark and his eyes were closed and in another life he could have been hers. He was Draco’s age, after all. She waited, hands trembling, for the hammer to fall.

“Dead,” the Dark Lord echoed, with hideous glee on his face, and Narcissa brushed the earth from her hands and breathed a soundless sigh of relief.

It was the first time she’d fought for anything in years. It felt like coming up for air.

 

* * *

 

At times, Narcissa thought she’d been fighting ever since she was born. With her parents, on occasion, but mostly with her sisters. They fought over everything: whose turn it was to wash up, who got to have the first go on their father’s old broom, whose fault it was that the teapot had fallen off the shelf and shattered into pieces. Bellatrix usually won. She was that type.

Bella was the model daughter, the golden girl. True, Andromeda was book-smart and got the best grades, but she also had a soft heart and nondescript brown eyes and she _blended into the crowd_ , none of which were traits that the Blacks admired in their offspring. And things had only got worse after she’d married Ted Tonks, a man seemingly chosen in defiance of everything that the Noble House of Black stood for. Two weeks after the marriage, they’d gathered together in the drawing room whilst her father ceremoniously burned a hole in the tapestry where her name had once been, leaving a charred scorch mark the size of a Sickle. The smell had hung around for weeks afterwards.

Narcissa supposed she should have felt sorry for her. After all, blood was blood, and you couldn’t change that, not with all the scorch marks in the world. But whatever pity she might have felt was eclipsed by relief.  _That could’ve been me,_ she’d thought, and whenever she saw Andromeda in the halls at school she simply lowered her head and pushed past her, as if they’d never even met.

But Bella…oh, Bella was clever and confident and cocksure, with big dark eyes and a painted mouth that pouted, and she knew just how to twist everyone around her little finger. Next to her, Narcissa was like a faded picture, and she knew it. Bella settled right in at Hogwarts as if it had been made especially for her, mastering its trick staircases and secret passages with ease. Her peers were both charmed and intimidated by her fearlessness. So, although they’d never have admitted it, were her teachers.

For Narcissa, things weren’t quite so easy.

Her first year at Hogwarts was like being underwater. The corridors were dark and stony and oppressive, deep-sea tunnels that had never seen the light. Lessons drifted around her head as idly as floating weeds. When anyone spoke to her, she would duck her head and pretend she hadn’t heard them. Soon, though, she found an easier way of dealing with it. Hold that head up high with a sniff, stare off into the middle distance; all those tricks worked like a charm. That way, she wasn’t stupid, wasn’t shy or awkward or anything else shameful like that. She just had better things to do with her time. She wasn’t interested in friends and she wasn’t interested in lovers. (The awkward times were long gone now; she’d buried them under layers of _richer-than-you_ and _stronger-than-you_ and _smarter-than-you._ Narcissa. Narcissus. The boy so in love with his own reflection that he forgot how real love was supposed to work. The irony wasn’t lost on her.)

She did her OWLS like a good girl. Scraped a few E’s here and there. The only thing she was really good at was fighting. She fought her teachers when they complained about late assignments. She fought the dark-haired Ravenclaw girl who sat in front of her during music practise and sang Dies Irae in a voice like cut glass. She fought the girls in her dormitory who talked behind her back and called her names, and the boy who asked her to go to the ball because his friends had dared him to try and fuck the ice queen.

“You’ll turn into a dyke if you carry on like this,” her mother predicted cheerfully. Narcissa ignored her and married Lucius, which her parents seemed to regard as the only good decision she’d ever made. She still fought him occasionally, but all the fun had gone out of it. He could beat her in verbal combat any day, and brawling in the street just wasn’t something that pureblood couples were supposed to do.

She could still remember the first time she’d punched someone in the face. The way Annie Kettleforth’s smug expression had vanished in a spray of blood, the corresponding shout of pain, the sting of hard knuckles on hard teeth. The way Annie had thrown herself at her in retaliation, _leapt_ on her, and how they’d rolled over, biting, kicking, clawing. She’d felt so alive then, with another girl's hair caught in her mouth and a fistful of that white, vulnerable flesh, so easy to twist, to turn dark red and painful. It was only a few minutes before a teacher had waded through the crowd of fascinated onlookers to wrench the two of them apart.

First blood didn’t count for anything. It certainly didn’t mean you’d won.

 

* * *

 

She visited her parents’ house, after the war. It hadn’t changed in the slightest – only a little older, a little stiffer, a little mustier – and the same went for her mother and father, only now they looked at her with confusion rather than disappointment. Why, she could hear them thinking, was _she_ the one who was left, when they’d lavished so much time and attention on her sibling? It was like spending all your money on maintaining a garden only for an unseasonal frost to kill it off. Narcissa made them tea in a cracked pot and tried to keep the conversation going. They steered around the subject of Lucius’ house arrest and their upcoming trial; it seemed like too hefty a topic to cover in an afternoon.

“If only you could have grown up more like your _sister,”_ her mother said at one point. “Now there was a girl who knew what she wanted and how to get it.”

“Two children,” her father said from his armchair, “one facing a lifetime in prison, one dead. What a world! Well, at least the second one went out with a bang.” And he laughed hollowly.

Narcissa could hardly believe it. Bellatrix had been dead for over a year and she was still getting all the attention. “At least I grew up,” she said, “and anyway, you’ve still got Andromeda.”

It was a low blow. “Andromeda is no daughter of mine,” said her mother, her teacup scraping ominously against the saucer as she replaced it.

“Why not?” Narcissa said. She was feeling reckless, the kind of recklessness that comes with having nothing left to lose. “She chose a side, too. She knew what she wanted and she got it, is that really so terrible?”

Her father stood, abruptly, and she flinched in spite of herself. “Andromeda was weak,” he said, each word jerky and precise. “Anyone who turns against the family like that deserves what they get. She was a traitor to the cause. _Our_ cause.”

Narcissa thought, but didn’t say: _Then what does that make me?_ “Perhaps I should be going,” she said instead.

“Yes,” said her mother, “I think that’s probably a good idea.”

 

* * *

 

When the war was over, the world divided into two distinct planes – Life Before, and Life Afterwards. Life Afterwards was greyer, foggy, indistinct. The pain and the fear was gone, mostly, but so was everything else. She made her way through it in much the same way she had when she’d started at Hogwarts – feeling her way through the mist, stumbling on unseen corners. Lost.

She was a year older than Bellatrix had ever managed to be.  

“We have to make things different,” she said to Lucius, one morning. That curious, reckless feeling was thrilling through her once again. It felt the way the air smelt on the first day of summer.

He turned a slow gaze from the front page of the Daily Prophet upwards, meeting her eyes. “What exactly do you mean by that?”

She couldn’t in all certainty say. There had always been a lot of thoughts tumbling in her head, and while she was thinking them they were bright and colourful and interesting, and they made _sense –_ a form of sense, at least. But when she opened her mouth, they turned to junk, and earned her strange looks. She learned to keep them to herself a long time ago.

But she was tired. She was so, so tired, and she’d had enough of waking up nauseous with the echo of a death-scream caught in her head, stumbling half-awake to the bathroom to try and scrub the memory of it off her hands. They didn’t go into the dining room any more, not if they could help it. This was partly because it no longer had any furniture; most of their belongings had been sold off, along with the house-elves and the ornamental gardens, in order to scrape together enough money for reparations. Now they divided their lives between the kitchen and the living room and their respective bedrooms, drifting from one to the next like pale, purposeless ghosts.

But that wasn’t the whole reason. Although he’d never said so, Narcissa knew Lucius felt the same way she did. The house was cold, but the dining room was colder. The broken nub where the chandelier had once hung seemed to mock them, as did the marks on the floor where the table had once stood – the table on which she had seen a woman murdered in cold blood, and done nothing. And what had come after

_(dinner, Nagini)_

didn’t bear thinking of.

Everyone had parts of themselves that they liked to keep hidden. Everyone had locked doors and dark rooms inside their heads, filled with boxes of the things they couldn’t bear to remember and couldn’t manage to forget. But nothing stayed buried forever. Sooner or later the memories would start rising to the surface, poking up like crocuses, fumbling their way towards the light. Perhaps she couldn’t undo her actions, but she could at least claim them as her own.

Narcissa knew she could never articulate any of it. Not in a way that he would understand. “Everything that happened,” she said instead. “All the…the damage. We’ve got to undo it. Make things better.”

“I don’t see why,” Lucius said.

Of course he didn’t. She frowned slightly, curving her hands around the cup of coffee to heat them. There didn’t initially seem much point, did there? The world was unfair. Always had been. People had tried to change that, and most of them had ended up dead.

 _She_ wasn’t dead, though. She was alive – she’d made it – and didn’t that give her some sort of responsibility, after all? What good was a life if you weren’t prepared to do anything with it? “All the same,” she said, “we should try.”

Lucius shrugged, returning to the newspaper. “If you must,” he said. “Charity isn't really my forte, though, so I hope you don’t expect me to get involved in your little do-good quest.”

She almost laughed, then. “Not in the slightest.” And it was true. She could do this alone, she thought; it might be hard, it might take a long time, but she could do _something_ for someone other than herself. There weren’t too many major decisions in her life that she had followed through with, but this one was different. This one felt like a promise.

The hardest part was convincing them to take her on. She didn’t exactly have the best track record; her family history was well-known, and even though the Potter boy had spoken out in her favour after things had quietened down, public opinion towards the Malfoys was still overwhelmingly hostile. Everyone was well-aware of what they’d done, of the part they’d played during the war. Few had been untouched by their actions: a family member here, tortured to death in their own home for the crime of having tainted blood, or a child there, waking with screaming nightmares after a year spent in captivity.

Narcissa was well-versed in the latter. Sometimes she still heard Draco crying out in his sleep, long after she and Lucius had gone to bed. The few times she’d tried to go to him had ended in disaster, and now she simply lay awake, listening, and thinking – in a detached sort of way – _I did this._ It was perhaps a selfish thought; her son’s choices had been his own, and she could hardly claim responsibility for every life that had been tainted by the Dark Lord’s rule. But she’d played her part. It wasn’t for nothing that they’d become one of the most hated families in Britain.

“Do you think we ought to move out?” she asked Lucius one night as they lay side by side, moonlight slanting through the gap in the curtains on to her face.

She felt rather than saw his body go stiff. “Move out? You mean – sell the Manor?”

“It might help,” she said, “with…things.” The house had history, now. Perhaps even more than they themselves did. The bloodstains on the floors had long since been scrubbed away, the cellar locked up and left empty, but you could only do so much. She tried to picture them somewhere else – a tiny, terrible flat in London, or a cottage somewhere by the sea – and drew a blank. Without their family legacy, what were they? Just a couple of war criminals, eking out a mean living far away from the damage they’d caused. “People don’t like it,” she said. “Us still living here, after everything that happened. Shutting ourselves away. They think it’s arrogance. Perhaps if we downsized, if we tried to seem more like them – ”

“The last thing we want,” Lucius said, “is to be more like them.” He sounded tired rather than angry, worn down to a thread. “This house has been in the family for three centuries. Do you really want us to keep chipping away at what is ours until there’s nothing left? It won’t pacify them, you know.”

It was a fair enough point, but – “Staying here won’t pacify them, either.”

Lucius was silent for a moment. Then he said, “They’ll forget. People always do.”

“Perhaps they shouldn’t,” said Narcissa – and she gathered up the bedcovers and rolled on to her side, facing the wall.

 

* * *

 

The first time somebody spat at her in the street she flinched. It was a knee-jerk reaction, uncontrollable, but she still felt the shame rise in a sick tide, felt her hands shake and the sweat break out on the back of her neck. _Never let them see your weaknesses,_ her mother snapped somewhere in the back of her head. Now, queuing outside the volunteers’ office with her slip of paper in hand, she slipped back into her old routine: chin lifted, back straight, pretending that she didn’t notice the glares and the muttering. “Some people,” said a voice from behind her, clear and distinct, “just don’t know when they’re not wanted.”

“How they avoided Azkaban I’ll never know,” someone else said.

Narcissa ignored it all and slid her piece of paper through the slot. “I’m applying to work with the relief services,” she said to the wizard behind the counter, who was eyeing her with a combination of confusion and contempt. “Do I need any prior experience?”

From behind her she heard muttering, and scattered laughter.

He took her application between thumb and forefinger, as if it might be poisonous, and said they’d get back to her. They didn’t.

Undaunted, she tried again.

And again. And again. Every no, she told herself, was taking her one step closer to a yes; and when a response finally came through confirming that she was eligible to volunteer at the local outreach team, she spent the day on the kind of high she hadn’t felt since she was a teenager, humming her way through the morning chores. (Chores were a novelty that she was starting to get used to, after the initial humiliation of having to scrape one’s own plate and wash one’s own clothes.)

“You seem happy,” Lucius said to her, in the kind of tone which suggested she rectify the condition as soon as possible.

“I’ve had some good news,” said Narcissa, dusting her way across the dining room.

Lucius shook his head and said nothing. Which was better, she thought, than outright disapproval. Perhaps he was adjusting to the idea. Perhaps he was just tired of arguing with her. Either way, it was good to have a little peace and quiet.

The training course was six weeks – longer than she’d expected it to be – and left her little time for making friends. Which was just as well, really. The first time she’d showed up, arriving at the agency at nine on the dot, her reception had been anything but warm. “What’s _she_ doing here?” one of her fellow volunteers demanded, pointing an accusatory finger.

Heads turned. Narcissa stood fixed to the spot, feeling as if she’d been thrust onstage without having first learned her lines. “I work here,” she said, after a moment. Her voice came out even plummier than usual.

“Like hell you do,” said the woman. “Trying to rebuild our public image, are we?”

 _Deborah Acton,_ said the badge on her lapel. A Muggle name if ever there was one. Narcissa restrained the automatic sneer tugging at her lips and said, “I’m here to help.”

“Oh, really?” Deborah Acton said. “Well, you needn’t bother, love. We all know what you think of people like us.”

Narcissa stared at her and realised that she wanted, quite badly, to hit her. Not like she’d hit Annie Kettleforth back in second year – not a punch, just a good old-fashioned slap to send her reeling and wipe that look of derision off her face. “It doesn’t matter what I think,” she answered instead, and turned to the course leader, who had been watching the exchange with limited interest. “Excuse me. Which is my seat?”

He pointed. She sat.

 _First blood doesn’t mean a win._ She told herself that, over and over, until it started feeling true.

It didn’t get much better. The others worked with her – they had to, if they wanted to get anywhere with the training – but she could tell they didn’t like it. When they were sorted into groups and told to discuss how to deal with victims of bereavement, or the best charms to repair magical property damage, she sat in her uncomfortable folding chair with her hands in her lap and listened, speaking only when directly spoken to. After a time people almost seemed to forget she was there. The barbed comments dropped to a minimum, which was good. All the same, she couldn’t help feeling like a mouse that had accidentally wandered into the lions’ den, and was simply biding its time until it was caught and eaten whole.

One day, when things were particularly bad, she ducked into the little kitchenette and switched on the kettle so that its hiss would mask her shuddery breathing. The walls were painted an unlovely shade of pale green. She leaned against the Formica counter, heart pounding, trying not to cry.

A hand touched her shoulder, and she jumped. “Hey,” said a voice. “You all right, love?”

She turned her head. It was Julie, one of the older volunteers. She was short and dumpy, painfully earnest, and a few years ago Narcissa would have laughed behind her back at her shapeless overalls and the threads of grey in her cropped hair. Now she simply sniffed and pulled away, embarrassed. “Fine, thank you.”

“Look,” Julie said, “it’s tough, I can see that. But the others – they’ll get used to you. Just give ‘em some time, all right? What matters is you’re doing the right thing.” And she smiled, the creases beside her eyes broadening out into wrinkles.

That almost set Narcissa off again. She turned away in order to hide the tears that were threatening, and reached for a mug and teabag with shaking hands. “Thank you,” she said again, keeping her voice as steady as she could. “I – appreciate it.”

Julie patted her shoulder in a companionable sort of way. “Come back out whenever you’re ready,” she said. “No rush.”

It was getting dark when she stepped out and found Lucius waiting for her, wrapped in a dark winter coat. She stopped short, the door banging shut behind her.

“Oh,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting to see you. Did you come all the way from home?”

“So this is where you work,” he said without acknowledging her question. She followed his gaze, and saw the outreach building through his eyes. How small it was, and how dingy; the paint that was peeling on the door, and the adverts messily Blu-tacked to the windows. For a moment, she felt ashamed.

People were beginning to file out, chattering and laughing with one another, pulling on scarves against the chill. Ordinary people. She thought of them going home to see their families, arriving back to a house that was warm and bright rather than empty and cold. She thought about Julie’s smile when she’d said _You’re doing the right thing,_ and how badly she’d wanted to believe her.

She lifted her chin. “Yes.”

Lucius nodded, slowly. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking. “Well,” he said, finally, and pushed a sweep of pale hair away from his forehead. “At least it gets you out of the house.”

 

* * *

 

Slowly but surely, things began to fall into place.

Narcissa went out to work four days a week. Helped rebuild houses that had been reduced to rubble, spoke to people who had come home to find the bodies of their sisters or their parents lying on a cold floor and the Dark Mark hanging above their house, lit up green against the night sky. Sometimes they were angry. Sometimes they blamed her, and sometimes they didn’t. Either way, she made sure they had somewhere to live, something to eat, a future. Everyone deserved a future.

She got home, and made dinner, and ate it with her husband and child – her child who had made it, against all the odds, even if he still had dark bags below his eyes and a tattoo on his arm that would never come off. Two years after he was supposed to have completed his seventh year, she saw him on to the Hogwarts Express. The sight of it was both familiar and a little surreal, as if they’d stepped back to a time before it had all gone so badly wrong. It had taken some wrangling for the school board to accept him – some parents, understandably, weren’t keen on having an ex-Death Eater attending the same establishment as their children – but she’d talked them round with the help of Minerva McGonagall, who had been far more amenable than she’d expected. The Potter boy (Harry, she might as well use his name after all this) had graduated the previous year and was training as an Auror. Her hopes for her son weren’t quite that high, but he could make something of himself if he tried. All he needed was a second chance.

On the morning that term was due to start, she felt him standing behind her. His silence had a weight to it that was heavier than his school trunk, packed with old textbooks that he’d never got to use. She put down the slice of toast that she’d been buttering, and turned around. “What is it, darling?”

Draco hesitated. Then he said, “It’s going to be bad, isn’t it?”

Her first instinct was to lie. But that was no good; Draco was smart, he’d see through it in an instant. Besides, he had to know. “Yes,” she said. “At first. But you’ll get past it.”

“Will I,” he said, inflectionless.

She shrugged, and tried for a smile. It was weak, but it was there. “I did.”

She didn’t make a fuss of him at the station, knew he’d only be embarrassed by it. Only gave him a quick hug and asked him to stay in touch, and to owl her if he needed anything. The train pulled away and she stayed there on the platform until it had vanished completely into the distance, watching the steam rise up into the sharp blue sky.

She continued to attend the outreach missions, feeling less like an interloper with each passing day. When she came home exhausted, hands shaking with overexertion and cheeks pink with cold, it felt like a victory. She still hadn’t asked Julie round for dinner, but she hoped one day that she might.

She bought new furniture. The pieces they’d sold after the war had been dark and austere (and ugly, although she’d never have said as much to Lucius), and so she went as far as possible in the opposite direction. She couldn’t buy enough to fill the mostly-empty house, but that was fine. The new curtains were white, and when the breeze caught them they billowed and rippled like water.

She planted flowers. They grew.

Perhaps, she thought, that was enough.


End file.
